HELP! Partition recovery or information recovery from deleted partition

[alexruiz]

As if you haven't read enough about stupidity with deleted partitions, here is mine.

I was running diskpart to prepare a SSD, but lazy me, I was using a script with parameters. I entered the wrong parameter (1 instead of 2) and poof, I selected my data disk instead. The script ran a "clean", then a "create partition primary", then "active", then "quick format".

So, as you can see, after deleting the partition, the diskpart script recreated another one in its place, same size, same type (NTFS) The disk was quarantined immediately. NO information has been overwritten to the disk. It is a Seagate single platter 1TB with aprox 500GB of information. I have a 2 months old backup, but because I have not overwritten anything else to the disk, the information in there should be intact, so I want to recover it.

I already tried running Easeus partition recovery (fast mode), but here is the tricky part: Because a new partition was created in the place of the old one, the partition tables only show the stuff for the new, empty partition. Easeus finds only the new partition.

What software do you recommend to use? Can easeus partition recovery in complete mode do it? I am suspecting I need to recreate the whole partition table doing a sector by sector scan of the disk. I am wary of doing it this way, because I had a similar situation a few years ago where I lost a partition containing only MP3s and ghost images. I used GetDataBack for NTFS back then, and while it recovered everything, the ghost images were unusable and the MP3s were not perfect, all ID3 info was lost, each file started 4 secs into the song and contained the first 2 secs of the next song at the end. I am not planning on using getdataback.

Did creating the new partition screw everything up?
I appreciate the help.

Thanks


Alex

 

[strep3241]

You can try a program called File Scavenger. Although my situation was different than yours, I have used this program with success where as other programs did not work. It found files that was dated from years ago.

To recover files, you have to pay for it but you can do a scan for free just to see if it finds anything.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Atola Technologies Partition Find and Mount is completely free. The free version's only handicap is that it's limited to a data transfer rate of 500 Kb/sec (about 29 Mb/min). Aside from that the free version is identical in capabilities to the Pro version, which has unlimited data transfer rate.

 

[alexruiz]

Thank you guys. I will give these a good look.
Keep the suggestions coming

Will report back as I progress


Alex

 

[alexruiz]

Well, time to report back. Before starting , thank you guys again for the suggestions.

I installed several software titles, then I installed the HDD in my desktop. Ran several of the titles and see what kind of results they produced.

- Atola partition find and mount found only the new clean partition, same as Easeus partition recovery. These 2 seem to be very specialized in a partition recovery when the partition record has not been overwritten. In my case, as the script repartitioned the drive, they didn't find the old partition.

- I the tried Easeus data recovery wizard, getdataback and I grabbed 3 of the suggested in topten reviews: Stellar phoenix, R-studio and advanced disk recovery. Results with these one were from middling (Easeus, who didn't find all of them and took almost 12 hours to scan the disk in complete) to very good (r-studio who scanned in 2 hours and found almost everything) All of them, however, had several files with incomplete names, or were unable to recover everything.

- I then fired file scavenger as suggested by memory. File scavenger didn't find anything in the quick mode, so I switched to complete mode. It only took 80 minutes for the whole 1TB hard drive scan, but the best part is that it found even files that I had deleted there months ago! All the files that I wanted to recover were there, with the proper original name in the proper folders. Previewing many of them showed that indeed recovery was successful (pictures) Once found, recovering files was a breeze, just select a whole folders and copy to another drive. Comparing some recovered folders that I had not modified after the last backup with the backup showed exactly the same information. Al the documents and pictures were recovered.

I overestimated the HDD usage, it wasn't 500GB of data, it was only 180, and that makes sense, as the data was in a 320GB HDD not long ago. Of those 180 GB, aprox 70GB were Ghost images, 30GB were ISOs of games installations, and other 25GB were videos that exist in other machines. The important data was only like 55GB, and only a few GB the ones truly needed (not in the backup). I went ahead and recovered some Ghost images and 2 ISOs to see if these big files were still ok. The Ghost images passed integrity check, and I even deployed one as test. Success! The ISOs mounted perfectly!

All the .docx and .xlsx files recovered fine So, other than the initial scare and a few hours lost, my stupidity didn't cause a massive loss. I consider myself lucky, and thankful for the suggestions. This is a fine piece of software.


Alex

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

I think we've all had that whoopps moment of trying to swap drives without enough sleep.

 

[strep3241]

Glad to hear you got everything back.

 

[alexruiz]

Glad to hear you got everything back.

Thank you very much, the file scavenger did indeed worked wonders! That was a great suggestion